Jocelyn Bell Burnell was part of the team of astronomers who discovered pulsars in 1967, for which Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. Born in 1943, she grew up in Lurgan in Northern Ireland, and was educated at an English Quaker boarding school and at Glasgow and Cambridge universities. "When Burnell was appointed Professor of Physics at the Open University, the number of female professors of physics in the UK doubled" (Britannica 1998). She has been a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) all her life, and for five years was their Yearly Meeting Clerk, chairing their 800-1500-strong annual gathering.
"My assistant for no apparent reason said quite urgently, 'The woman in blue on the back row'. I called the woman in blue, and she spoke about evil and suffering from her own experience and it called the whole gathering to an immensely deeper level. Helen just knew it had to be her. That was God working in a way that was dramatic, and scary."
"Religious people tend to start with two assumptions: one, that God is loving, and two, that God is in charge of the world. When faced with a conundrum like the problem of suffering, what the scientist would say is, maybe one of those assumptions is mistaken. I feel it's the second assumption, that God is in charge of the world. Human beings will never grow up unless we have a God who stands back."